On the Mountain

Boulder, Colorado

It’s amazing that humanity can be so still – so still that I can sit here in the mountains with the sunrise and for as much as 30 seconds at a time hear not a sound of the man-made. The sky is a different blue above the mountain ridge. Over on the horizon it’s doing that ground-white I so often watch at home, as if the blue is taking on its color from the ground up, and on the mountain it is already there as if it came from on high.

I came to Colorado as if something was going to happen.

I gave a talk. Met so many living human beings in the flesh. I was filmed. The young man filming asked about duality. I spoke of paradox. I feel it again, so funnily aware for the first time this morning of having come to the mountain in the flesh.

In my Course of Love we go to the mountain. There’s also a lot of talk about both/and. Someone asked me about that once too:

“Aren’t “both & and” the same thing?”

I said, “And” is like there’s “this” and “that.” "Both" is different – like the two existing together.”

That’s the paradox of my morning sitting on my mountain perch looking down on the valley.

Something is happening.

I was nervous as all get out about coming here. Some of it was “speaker nerves.” Could I be real, be “me,” have heart, and still express those words and ideas that allow us to share.

And then there was a “we” that formed. Heart energy filled the room. There was ease.

Some of my “nerves” was the nervous excitement of feeling “something is happening.”

I talked a lot about the change to our way of knowing that comes with our spiritual experiences. But it became clear to me again…this time sitting one-on-one with a new friend:

It’s not about what we know but who we are.

A way of knowing isn’t about “what” we know, so I’m not saying I talked about the wrong thing, only that of all the profound insights and deep feelings that were shared – that’s the one.

It’s not about what we know but about who we are.

Later today I go home. On the schedule for tomorrow, in the work I do there, my elderly companion will be having her carpet cleaned. I will move the small things. Set up fans. Put elastic socks on swollen feet. Continue what was begun here in a different way. It’s not all from the ground up or from the top down.

This is the new I’m seeing. It’s in us.

I suppose now that it might have been a good thing if I’d blogged my way through this – the preparations for coming – everything from choosing my clothes around the factor of comfortable shoes, to borrowing my daughter’s big purse for a carry-on, to fretting over what I would say and how I would say it. I maybe could have shown the whole dichotomy between something big coming and something big having occurred.

I’m not sure how to recognize that something big did occur while at the same time acknowledging there’s not really much in this life that is either big or little and that it’s all of one piece.

The only real comparison I can make of it is birth. So much is already done before the birth takes place. But the birth is the manifesting of new life.

That is how this feels – how I feel this day on the mountain.

When That's All There Is

I look out the window at the fire pit, with its empty red box of pampers lying under the most recent addition of twigs, and some kind of palate beneath, the limb that fell in the last storm – not yet broken and placed there – but nearby, and I know there’s more leafs covering the ground and that they’re brown, and that fall really is here and in two months or two weeks it’ll be winter. But today it’s sunny, and the leafs are still green and some yellow and dazzling, and definitely hanging on. There’s still a canopy.

It’s not like this grief stuff didn’t really happen, or like I didn’t have this feeling today…once again…as if it’s a continual kind of thing that I don’t often notice, and that I may be grieving the “old life” as a way of moving into the new.

There’s a lot of change going on. How could there not be when everything is in flux and you’ve moved into a place with your whole family, and at times it seems like with the whole world, where you’re aware of it. That’s the thing. You can go through so much of life acting as if things don’t change when they are always changing. Like your life day-to-day will stay the same when it never does.

Then you hear yourself say things.

“How is everything?”

“Uncertain.”

Okay.

Sometimes I’m glad for the awareness. Sometimes I wish like hell it would go away…or that something really stabilizing would appear out of the mists. It seems natural enough to me.

I walked out here in the dark this morning to turn on the heater and the light. There was a bright star hanging over the freeway fence. I went back in, made my coffee, my peanut butter and honey sandwich, fed the cats. When I came back out, the star was nowhere to be seen. But on my second walk, there was a light in the cabin window and I was filled with joy and hope and all things peaceful.

I guess what I’m saying is that being aware that change is here and coming and all of that doesn’t have to be like it was last week in the storm and wind and cold.

You need a break. You don’t need it in your face. And sometimes, when you notice a star, or a light in the window, or when the sun is shining…that’s all there is.